I'm Coming Apart at The Seams
by FearoftheInevitable
Summary: Extended version of the one shot "I Just Can't Help Falling In Love With You". {Prompt: Your soulmate's first words to you are tattooed on your body.}


A six year old Clarke Griffin is turning around, trying to read the tattoo on her back with the mirror in her bedroom in the Phoenix division of the Ark. She pulls her long blonde hair off of her back, holding it up on the top of her head as she cranes her neck to read the lettering of the text that has been on the back since the day she turned six, as she does every afternoon while her parents are at work. Clarke squints her ocean blue eyes as she begins to read the letters aloud. She jumps when she hears the pressurized door open in the small apartment.

"Clarke? Abby?" Her father, Jake, yells, walking in from a long day at work where he had attempted to balance the oxygen levels on the shuttle. Sometimes he wished the nuclear war that occurred eighty four years ago never happened, but he knew that if that was the case, he would have never met his soulmate, Abby Griffin. Jake wandered into Clarke's room after hearing a cup of pencils hit the metal floor to find her seated on her dresser, her back to the mirror, and her hair on top of her head.

"Clarke, honey. What are you doing?" He asks, chuckling at the sight before him.

"I was trying to read my tattoo, Daddy," Clarke replied, letting go of her long locks which quickly returned to their previous position, framing Clarke's heart shaped face.

"Well, why don't we see what it says," He exclaims, picking her up to read her soulmate's first words to her aloud. "You're the one who burned three hundred of my warriors alive," He says, not thinking about what the text says until he places her down on the floor. As he reads the text that lay upon his daughter's back Abby emerges from her small lab down the hall where she had been testing the effects of radiation on skin cells.

"What kind of soulmate is that?" She asked as she arrived in Clarke's doorway. Jake prays nightly that it's just a stupid game, that Clarke won't actually burn three hundred people alive, but he knows that with the way the oxygen levels on the Ark are decreasing his daughter could be sent down to earth in a matter of years to see if it is once again in a habitable condition.

On Clarke's eighth birthday she meets Wells Jaha, son of the chancellor, out near the solar fields where the Ark grew its herbal plants, fruits, and vegetables.

"Hi, you must be Clarke. My dad told me all about you," Wells says, holding his arm out to shake the younger girl's hand.

"Hi Wells, I'm Clarke. Would you like to see my drawings?" She replies, taking his hand in her own. Well's brown eyes light up as she says this. He looks down at the words on his forearm, knowing now that he's met his soulmate.

At the age of fourteen Clarke branches out and starts meeting new people. As she talks to people from Walden and Alexandria she grows closer to them, silently hoping one of them will say the words that are etched into the skin on her back, but nobody does.

"This is stupid," Clarke exclaims, throwing her paintbrushes across her room one afternoon. "I'm never actually going to meet the person I'm meant to be with, am I?" She calls out into the void of her bedroom— which looks more like a jail cell with its metal walls, ceiling and floor than the bedroom of a fourteen year old girl— causing her mother to enter the room.

"Clarke, please," Abby starts, picking up the shards of glass from the vase that once held her paintbrushes. "You'll meet the person you're meant to be with one day."

"Really Mother? Please inform me on when that will happen, because I've already met everyone on our side of this metal death trap and no one's first words to me had been _you're the one who burned three hundred of my warriors alive._ Who am I kidding, who on earth would say something as absurd as what my tattooreads?"

"Clarke, don't lose hope just yet. You'll find your soulmate." Her mother reassures her, placing a hand on her shoulder before turning to throw away the shards of glass that rest in her hand.

Clarke forgets all about her soulmate when Wells betrays her three weeks after her sixteenth birthday and her father is floated for trying to warn the citizens of the ark about the depleting oxygen levels. She only remembers her tattoo when she's removed from solitary three weeks before her eighteenth birthday and thrown into the dropship, waiting to depart for earth. As the dropship detaches from the ark and begins to descend towards earth, the boy seated next to her removes his safety straps and begins to float around the cabin. _Finn,_ Clarke thinks, remembering her cellmate Thalia, talking about him when she had first been confined.

"Hey, you're the traitor who's been in solitary for a year," Finn, a boy from the Alexandria division says, floating in front of Clarke's face.

"You're the idiot who wasted a month of oxygen on an illegal spacewalk," Clarke retorts, pushing back the slight sorrow she feels after finding out that the attractive boy with the floppy hair in front of her isn't in fact her soulmate. Clarke takes a minute as she looks around the dropship at the other ninety nine delinquents strapped down around her and assumes that she doesn't have a soulmate, or that this is just some cruel joke, and she pushes the idea of having a soulmate behind, focusing on staying alive for as long as she can. When the dropship breaks through the earth's atmosphere it's pushed off course and eventually crash lands a few miles away from their destination, Mount Weather. Little did they know, they landed in enemy territory during a ninety year long war between the people of the ground and the inhabitants of the mountain. Within the first day they're under attack as one of their own, Jasper Jordan, is impaled while venturing towards mount weather in search of supplies.

When Clarke finally sees Finn's tattoo on his chest _\- so you're that Collins boy that my mother is always talking about; the name's Raven, and it's a pleasure to finally meet you-_ that she knows she wasn't his soulmate either.

Clarke remembers the tattoo again when the grounders start coming for them. She thinks of her tattoo only briefly at times, once when she spots Bellamy's tattoo on the edge of his shoulder where it simply reads _**Bell.**_

"What's up with your tattoo?" She asks, looking for an explanation. Bellamy, the tall muscular, dark haired bad boy from Walden, smirks before looking over at her.

"It was Octavia's first word," Bellamy responds, grinning from ear to ear as he silently remembered the encounter.

 _A young Bellamy sits under the floorboards, holding his now one year old sister as the guards searched the home. There were regulations on the Ark on how many children a couple could have in the society that orbited the earth, and that limit was one child per couple. In some situations, couples weren't allowed to reproduce at all, but the rules were always broken. Bellamy smiled down at his baby sister as she held his index finger in her tiny hands. As he hears the guards leave their small apartment, he gets up to leave the small space they were forced to hide in but as he begins to unlatch the door to the hidden passage he hears a tiny voice call up to him._

" _Bell," Octavia said, quietly, pulling his finger closer to her tiny body._

" _What was that, O?" He asked, simply. He was shocked and excited at the same time. The only boy with a sibling on Walden, nay, the Ark, and his sister's first word was his nickname._

" _Bell!" She said again, this time with more enthusiasm in her voice as she shook her arms, moving his index finger with her hands. She chirped the word a few more times, just babbling to him, and in that moment he knew that this was the only place he would ever want to be; with his sister in his arms, protected by her big brother no matter what._

Clarke denies a treaty with the Commander's second in command. The war is coming and she tells Raven, the youngest zero G mechanic in fifty four years who ventured to earth on her own in search of her boyfriend, of her plan to blast off. As Raven turns away to draw up her plans to reprogram the rockets on the dropship to fire towards the treeline, Clarke catches a glimpse of the tattoo on her ribcage, through the open sides of her shirt. _Hello there, beautiful; I'm Finn... And you are?_ Clarke smiles to herself, knowing that Raven's soul mate is Finn, that they somehow found one another in this corrupt world and that they could finally be happy together here on earth. Her thoughts of finding her own soulmate are interrupted when Bellamy speaks up.

"Barbecued grounders, I like it," Bellamy announces. Clarke's head nearly explodes at the thought. _Oh god, I'm actually going to burn 300 warriors alive. It'd be funny if the situation wasn't so damn terrifying_ , she thinks, leaving the tent she was in previously.

Grounders charge the makeshift camp that surrounded the dropship days later, killing a number of the delinquents. Clarke pulls the lever and the rockets burn the grounder warriors to a crisp. At the end of the battle, 300 grounders are dead and the delinquents are down to fifty two. Within a matter of seconds, soldiers in hazmat suits capture forty seven of the children from the sky, including Clarke. Bellamy and Finn are missing, but all Clarke worries about is the possibility finally finding her soulmate, and she just waits for the moment she finally does. When she wakes up in a new environment, Mount Weather quarantine, she tries to escape. What she finds is a room full of grounders whose bone marrow is being harvested so that the mountain men can leave their base without their hazmat suits. She escapes the mountain, but not before being made aware that the delinquents will be used for the same purpose, so that the president of the mountain and his people can finally feel the earth beneath their feet. Clarke finds the five missing delinquents, and witnesses Finn kill eighteen innocent grounder villagers in his delirious search for her when he assumes she and the forty six others were captured by them.

"I found you," Finn exclaims, sending a shudder down Clarke's spine, and all she can think about is _finding her goddamn soulmate_.

When Clarke appears at the Commander's tent for a meeting, she's greeted by a tall, muscular man; she silently hopes he's not her soulmate. He finally speaks up.

"If you so much as look at her the wrong way I will slit your throat." Gustus, the Commander's guard, whispers, striking fear into Clarke, just as he had hoped to. Clarke takes a deep breath, still hoping to find her soulmate amongst the grounders, and steps into the commander's tent, unbeknownst of what to expect. As she walks closer, she can see the girl, no older than twenty, who has ordered her warriors to kill her people since they landed on the ground, and yet she can't think of anything other than her youth and beauty. Clarke loses her ability to speak for a fraction of a second, only wanting to say things like _well, she's hotter than I imagined._

"You're the one who burned three hundred of my warriors alive," The Commander, Lexa, says, spinning the blade of her dagger against her gloved hand. When Clarke finds her soulmate in the grounder commander, she thinks that it's almost a cruel joke. She swallows hard before saying anything.

"You're the one who sent them there to kill us," Clarke replies, attempting to maintain her strong, leader-esque demeanor. There's a sly grin on Lexa's face for a split second as she raises her head, finally meeting eyes with Clarke. Lexa's emerald eyes glisten as she screams internally.

They formed an alliance after the grounders received justice for the death of eighteen of their people when Finn was killed in what raven had thought was 'cold blood' by the hand of their own leader, Clarke. When Lexa had kissed her, she was still feeling the remorse from killing the first person she had slept with on earth, Raven's soulmate. Clarke wanted her to feel as if she had just killed the person she was meant to spend her life with because she didn't know that she was, in turn, the Commander's soulmate. Little did she know, in twenty four hours- exactly two weeks before Clarke's eighteenth birthday- her soulmate was going to rip her heart out with four words. _May we meet again._

It's not until two months after Clarke's eighteenth birthday that she finally sees Lexa again. They begin with catching up, making small talk, before Clarke finally gets to her point.

"You had done what I would have, back at the mountain," Clarke starts, placing her hand upon Lexa's. "And I did what you would have," She finishes, locking eyes with the Commander that sat before her, the fire that was lit next to them Illuminating the taller girl's features, bringing a gold color to her emerald eyes.

"And what was that, Clarke?" Lexa asked, brushing a curl out of the blonde's face.

"Saved my people," She replied, looking down at the logs that burned in their makeshift fireplace outside of the Commander's home in Polis, the grounder capitol, made of stone and elegantly carved wood. Lexa lifted Clarke's chin, forcing those blue eyes to meet her green ones.

"You did what was right, Klark kom skaikru," Lexa said, looking between Clarke's eyes and lips.

"I forgive you, for walking away back there. You saved your people, and that's what was right for you at the time," She swallowed hard before continuing. "What are you going to do now that the mountain has been defeated?" Clarke asked, swallowing again before locking her gaze onto Lexa's pink lips.

"I'm going to use my heart, and not my head," Lexa replied, quickly crashing her lips against Clarke's as the smaller girl wrapped her arms around the Commander's neck, her legs snaking around the taller girl's waist. Lexa picked her up in one swift motion, carrying her into her home before kicking the door closed behind her. Lexa placed Clarke down upon her bed of furs before pulling away. Clarke began to tug at the hem of Lexa's shirt, trying to pull it up over the girl's head.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Lexa asked, receiving a nod from Clarke who pulled the Commander's shirt off before removing her own throwing them against the wall behind her.

It was then that Clarke saw her own words upon Lexa's left pectoral, just above her heart. _You're the one who sent them there to kill us._ It was then, and only then, that she realized she had found the one person who she was meant to spend the rest of her life with.


End file.
